{
  "title": "DRACULA",
  "category": "[MOTION-PICTURE; RADIO-SERIAL]",
  "article": "The twisted and torturous route by which the Hungarian actor went from stage Dracula to film\nDracula has been intricately chronicled by various Lugosi biographers and by David Skal in his\nbook Hollywood Gothic. Once the movie was ready for release early in 1931, Universal started\ntheir publicity machinery churning at full force, since—in a very real sense—the fate of the studio\ndepended significantly upon the box-office pull of this one film (although no one anticipated the\nphenomenal success that it would become).\nAs part of the promotional barnstorming, WCFL in Chicago was approached by the Radio-\nKeith-Orpheum theater chain about doing a serialized dramatization of the Dracula story during\nthe week that the film was scheduled to open in that city. The station, which was operated by the\nChicago Federation of Labor, lacked a sufficient drama staff of its own, so they issued a open call\nfor auditions. Among the few applicants for work was a high school senior named Bert (later Bret)\nMorrison, who had had a distinguished amateur thespian career up to this point, capped the\nprevious year by winning for his alma mater Senn the coveted Drama League Student Production\nAward over the efforts of their chief competitor, the Todd School for Boys under the direction of\n15-year-old Orson Welles.\nIn the ensuing years Morrison gave conflicting accounts of how he scored the Dracula job. He\ntold  interviewer Chuck Schaden that he had been working at WCFL since 1929. “I had my own\npoetry hour there. And then later, as a result, we formed a little theater group with a nucleus of\nplayers that we had at Senn, under the same director. We used to do one-act plays on the air.\nThen, eventually, I did some publicity work for Universal Pictures and we did across-the-board,\nfive half-hours a week and did the complete version of Dracula, which they had just filmed…”\nAt other times he related a completely different story. He asserted that there was an open call\nfor actors, that he showed up—a stranger to the WCFL people—and bluffed his way through the\naudition, even telling the station staff that he was a professional actor and that he had already\nplayed Dracula in stock (which he had not). If this version is true, then it was certainly\nbraggadocio worthy of his rival Welles (who later that same year made similar claims of previous\nprofessional activity when applying for work at Dublin’s Gate Theatre). According to this version\nof Morrison’s story, he walked away not only with the role of Dracula but also the responsibility\nfor directing the production. He immediately hired his Senn drama teammate Hugh Hipple (later\nMarlowe)",
  "origination": "WCFL, Chicago, Illinois.",
  "duration": "March 16-21, 1931.",
  "personnel": "Bert Morrison (director).\nCAST: Peggy Davis, Hugh Hipple, Bert Morrison (Count Dracula).\nSPONSOR: Radio-Keith-Orpheum (theatre chain).",
  "extant_recordings": "None.\nDRACULA (WCFL, CHICAGO)\n[Monday-Saturday—\nMarch 16, 1931\n[PART 1]\nMarch 17, 1931\n[PART 2]\nMarch 18, 1931\n[PART 3]\nMarch 19, 1931\n[PART 4]\nMarch 20, 1931\n[PART 5]\nMarch 21, 1931\n[PART 6]",
  "chronology": "",
  "sources": "",
  "gallery": "",
  "images": []
}